Sunday, December 19, 2010

Operation Humble Woodchuck: a progress report

Thanks to all of you who sent in lengthy dithyrambs about our chubby forest friend. We won’t Publish them all, lest the Googlepolice suspect we’re trying to game the system. If they catch you doing that, they suspend you from the Crawler, and you shrivel up and die. So we must proceed ve-ry sly-ly and unobtrusively -- like our buddy of the underbrush, the Humble Hedgehog.

Anyhow, so far, not so good. A search on “humble woodchuck” does not bring up this site on the first page, nor the second, nor the third… Worse, right in the middle of the very first page we find a hit with the title “Is this a Premature Ejaculation Problem?” , together with a most baffling snippet of text, “the woodchuck is using you for sex” (don’t wanna know).

And so, comrades, we shall have to strive harder. And remember: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog -- heck, the hedgehog’s cute, he don’t need to know nothin.

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The first novel-length story featuring the Murphy Bros.

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

It contains stories previously published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as new stories never before published. Click the cover to download it to your Kindle now!

About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.